Stockxpert Photographers Rebel

On July 15, Steve Kapsinov, Jupiterimages' community manager for StockXpert, announced on the contributor forum that the company planed to offer StockXpert's microstock images on Jupiter's subscription site, Photos.com. Photographers were to be paid $.30 per image downloaded from the Photos.com site.

Jupiter executives saw this as a win-win for both, but there was an immediate rebellion by Stockxpert contributors - 600 posts to the forum to date. Many are not just opting out of the Photos.com deal, they are also pulling all their images off the site.

(1)Â Â The photographer's images were to be moved to this new venue unlessÂ photographers opted-out of having their images in any subscription offering, including Stockxpert's subscription offering. (Photographers thought they should have been given the option to opt-in if they wanted to participate, rather than being forced to opt-out if they didn't like the deal.)

(2)Â Â The details of the offering were not clearly explained.

(3)Â Â Their images could now be used for Extended Licenses on physical goods for resale and the photographer would still only get $.30 for such a use. (They were getting higher fees for such uses on Stockxpert.)

(4)Â Â There will be a new pay-per-download feature for higher resolution images will be priced from $49 to $299/image. Photographers will receive 30% of any of these sales. (While this puts occasional uses into the midstock price range, the greater concern is that customers would be happy with file sizes of up to 15MB and these could be purchased on Photos.com as part of a one-month subscription of $99.95. The cheapest subscription on Stockxpert is $219.95.)

(5)Â Â With a minimum one-month subscription price of $99.95, any customer who only needs a couple images, and for whom a 15MB file is satisfactory, is smarter to buy a subscription (photographer gets $.30) rather than a single image where the photographer gets 30% of the fee.

(6)Â Â Many photographers were concerned about the quality of the wholly-owned imagery on Photos.com and believed the value of their higher quality Stockxpert images would be depreciated.

(7)Â Â There will be a new brand called Photos.com Plus, but it is unclear whether this contains Stockxpert images only or includes Photos.com images. It is unclear whether all images will be on Photos.com, as well. It is also unclear whether the pricing of the two brands will be different.

(8)Â Â Photographers also opposed the idea of allowing unlimited circulation of any print product without the customer being required to purchase an Extended License. (Most photographers seemed to think that Shutterstock's 250,000 and iStock's 500,000 limits for a standard license fee were more than generous and balked at giving large users unlimited circulation for the same low prices.)

(9)Â Â As a result of Jupiter's rather unilateral actions, photographers fear they had lost control of how their images would be licensed.

Included in this posting is an interesting itemization of all the various types of uses that are allowed for the basic subscription price.

After the "clarification," a contributor with the screen name forgiss said: "So nothing actually changed in the deal, but SXP and JI have become more heavy-handed in their approach to submitters. Sorry, but it feels like I just heard a pitch from a secondhand car salesman, obscuring the facts and highlighting the problems as "features."

Jim Pickerell is founder of www.selling-stock.com, an online newsletter that publishes daily. He is also available for personal telephone consultations on pricing and other matters related to stock photography. He occasionally acts as an expert witness on matters related to stock photography. For his current curriculum vitae go to: http://www.jimpickerell.com/Curriculum-Vitae.aspx.

Comments

Be the first to comment below.

Post Comment

You must log in to post comments.

Stay Connected

Sign up to receive our FREE weekly email listing new stories posted.

Follow Us

In the last two years I have written a lot about stock photo pricing and its downward slide. If you have time over the holidays you may want to review some of these stories as you plan your strategy ...Read More

If you’re a photographer that counts on the licensing of stock images to provide a portion of your annual income the following are a few stories you should read. In the past decade stock photography ...Read More

The opening session at this year’s CEPIC Congress in Berlin on May 30, 2018 is entitled “Can Blockchain be applied to the Photo Industry?” For those who would like to know more about the existing blo...Read More

The following are links to stories that deal with stock photo pricing trends. Probably the biggest problem the industry has faced in recent years has been the steady decline in prices for the use of ...Read More

This story is FREE. Feel free to pass it along to anyone interested in licensing their work as stock photography. On October 23rd at the DMLA 2017 Conference in New York there will be a panel discuss...Read More

If you’ve been shooting all summer and haven’t had time to keep up with your reading here are links to a few stories you might want to check out as we move into the fall. To begin, be sure to complet...Read More

This story provides links to several stories that relate to the Visual China Group (VCG) acquisition of Corbis and the role Getty Images has been assigned in the transfer of Corbis assets to the Gett...Read More

Many think search will be solved with better Metadata. While metadata is important, there are limits to how far it can take the customer toward finding the right piece of content. This story provides...Read More